Pep Guardiola: West Ham game is more important for Man City than Carabao Cup

City go into the midweek tie missing six senior players. Rayan Ait-Nouri and Omar Marmoush are both away on African Cup of Nations duty, while Jeremy Doku is expected to miss two to three weeks after sustaining a muscle injury last week.

Rodri, John Stones and Mateo Kovacic are also unavailable through injury, with none of the trio due to return in time to face Brentford.

Guardiola admitted he is unsure whether City have the depth to win the competition this season, despite lifting the Carabao Cup four consecutive times between 2018 and 2021.

Even so, the City manager revealed he had planned to rotate his squad regardless of injuries, having named largely unchanged line-ups in recent matches against Sunderland, Real Madrid and Crystal Palace.

The Carabao Cup has traditionally provided Guardiola with an opportunity to give minutes to fringe and academy players, a policy that has continued this season.

Divine Mukasa, who has trained with the first team for much of the campaign, was named on the bench against Crystal Palace following Doku's injury. Reigan Heskey has also worked with the senior group again in recent weeks, while Kaden Braithwaite was promoted to first-team training this week.

Guardiola confirmed James Trafford will start in goal and stressed that priority remains Saturday's Premier League fixture against West Ham, as City look to maintain pressure on Arsenal at the top of the table.

"James is going to play and all the players who didn't play are going to play, plus some who played today and some from the academy. After that, in three days we have West Ham," he said.

"I'm not saying that getting to the semi-finals of the League Cup is not the priority, but normally when we achieve it is because we have all the squad, no injuries and we can rotate, the team is good.

"When you are one game away from the semi-finals in one competition, you can take it because you never know when it's going back.

"I have to find the balance but there are players with a lot of minutes and now we will travel and arrive late in Manchester with not much time to recover and with the physios and the doctors I have to see because the important game is West Ham. I'm sorry but West Ham is so, so important." 

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